Automating Marketing Strategies To Scale A Business FASTER – with Philip F. Smith

Arlen Robinson ([00:03].644)
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Philip Smith, who is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and author who partnered with Kevin Harrington, one of the original sharks on Shark Tank. He also made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies 5 times and he did it as a 1 employee company, working from home. He started his first business in 1998 and has been part of 5 acquisitions so far.

Philip is an expert in B2B lead generation and is one of the most sought-after consultants, working with over 10,000 clients and counting. His most recent business, All In One Marketing.com, was created to help companies scale their digital marketing without making costly mistakes. He provides 3 main services, Chief Marketing Officer / Consulting services, an all-in-one marketing software platform and PR services where he can get a company interviewed on major TV networks and published on over 600 websites. Welcome to the podcast, Philip.

Philip Smith ([01:23].12)
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Arlen Robinson ([01:25].264)
Yeah, thank you for joining me. And yeah, really excited to talk to you today. You’ve been in the game for a long time, e-commerce businesses, working with other businesses as far as on a marketing consultancy basis. So I think you’ve kind of seen it all and you’ve probably done it all as well. But I think today what we’re going to kind of hone in on as far as the topic is really going to be automating.

marketing strategies to scale a business faster. How do you really do this? Because as most businesses know, it’s really all about speed and efficiently getting a lot of these marketing tactics automated so you don’t spend time and become slow to market and get left behind by your competitors. So I think automation is really important today. And so we’re gonna be diving deep into that, but before we do get into all of that.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and how you specifically got into what you’re doing today.

Philip Smith ([02:26].502)
Yeah, sure. You know, in 1998, I started my first business. I never had an actual real corporate job. Never made sense to me. So I jumped right into, I did an internship and I basically started my first business in 1998. That was in a web hosting. I used to sell dial-up services in 1998, if you can. Well, you remember that, right? So that was an interesting.

Arlen Robinson ([02:49].904)
Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. Yep.

Philip Smith ([02:54].214)
I used to try to download like 20 songs when I went to sleep. Uh, overnight they would download, but, uh, but, you know, that business. Yeah, it’s, it’s just crazy how that we all thought that was the game changer when that was happening, but 1998 got into that business, got to web hosting business, and then that became a commodity. Uh, we got out in 2005, we sold it in 2006. I made a decision that if I could help companies make money.

Arlen Robinson ([03:00].994)
I really love movies.

Philip Smith ([03:22].382)
I will always be able to make money. So since 2006, I basically been working with companies in all different ways. I sold that consulting company twice in 2010 and 2012. I actually sold it to an investment fund. I joined the investment fund, it grew bigger, and then we sold it again. That’s when I got into the lead generation world. And that’s where I found my calling, if you will. I love lead generation. I love that side of the business.

biggest problem that most companies have is generating leads. Doesn’t even matter what they do. Most companies just have an issue, uh, trying to figure that out, scale it. And like you said before, automate the entire funnel process, depending on obviously what their services or products are completely different, obviously for different businesses, but at the end of the day, they need to drive traffic. Uh, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Basically, I guess you could say full time in 2014, been the lead generation world. I started doing more brand building. I got into the education side of the business. And that’s when I realized I needed to build my brand. And I said, what’s the fastest way to build your brand? Well, partner with someone with a bigger brand, right? So I actually spammed all the sharks that are ever on that show. 

Arlen Robinson ([04:42].324)
Thank you.

Philip Smith ([04:44].106)
I talked to three different sharks. I ended up doing a deal with Kevin Harrington. His son lives 20 minutes away from me. That was kind of like the deciding factor for me because I thought it would be easier to build a better relationship with them. So I’ve been working with them since 2018. I literally last week in Miami, met with Damon John. We’re trying to do stuff with him now. Him and Kevin are good friends. And so I’m just trying to keep attaching myself to the right people today. And obviously, yeah, all the services that we provide.

Arlen Robinson ([05:05].133)
Okay.

Philip Smith ([05:13].062)
Obviously I try to use bigger names than me to attract our clients.

Arlen Robinson ([05:18].416)
Gotcha, gotcha. Well, that’s some good stuff. Yeah, great track record. And like you said, you definitely have aligned yourself with all the right people. Yeah, Kevin Harrington is, I’m a huge Shark Tank fan and I think I’ve watched every single episode. So you can say I’m a Shark, oh, a donkey, every episode up until the latest one. So, yep, I do remember Kevin Harrington. He was one of the original Sharks. And then, you know.

Philip Smith ([05:34].622)
You too.

Philip Smith ([05:38].387)
I’m with you.

Arlen Robinson ([05:45].844)
course, Damon, he’s been on since the very beginning as well. And he’s done very well. I think, you know, his company, one of his companies, Bombus Sox, I think they’re the highest grossing company out of all of the companies that I have been invested in. So he’s doing big things. So that’s definitely a good relationship for you to have for sure. And so, you know, at the top of that, so that, as I said, today, we’re going to be kind of diving deep about, you know, the automation process because

You know, time is money and the more you can automate the better, especially when it comes to, you know, lead generation and all the things that come with taking someone from one end of your funnel to the, to the other end, and hopefully getting them all the way to be a customer. And so these days there’s a ton of tools out there. And so I wanted to see if you can share some insight on, you know, how automation tools can really just.

facilitate this rapid scale up in businesses and how do you use them effectively?

Philip Smith ([06:45].25)
It’s funny because, as you said before, I made the Inc 5000 list of fastest working private companies as a one employee company. How do you do that as a one employee company? And tomorrow I’m literally flying to the Inc 5000 gala to do their conference and gala and celebrate and get the awards and all that stuff. So I’m flying to San Antonio actually tomorrow for that. And when the first time I ever went to the Inc 5000, I never thought I was really doing anything special.

Arlen Robinson ([06:54].879)
Yep.

Arlen Robinson ([07:06].053)
Okay.

Philip Smith ([07:13].25)
And what happened was people started asking me, how are you here as a one employee company? And it comes down to exactly what you’re saying, automation. Automate and scale. And that’s why I only get involved in businesses that can do that. But to dive into detail, over the years, email marketing with the SMS marketing, obviously everything has drastically changed. Funnel building, how you sell online, how do you automate the entire process? The number one ways to contact.

Arlen Robinson ([07:20].775)
Right.

Philip Smith ([07:42].73)
Listen, when you generate a lead, there’s only so many ways you can contact them. Whether you’re going to pick up the phone and call them, you have people doing that. You do your email marketing, you probably get anywhere between a 20% and a 50% open rate, just depending on your business and what you’re selling. But you’re only touching such a small percentage of the leads that you generate. And probably maybe up to half the leads that you generate are fake information or you’re never going to contact them.

So you’re double, whatever your lead cost is, you have to double it for that aspect, but how do you do that? So we always get our hands dirty with everything that we do. And we learned that over the years, when we generate leads, what we learned is that you need to hit them as many times as you possibly can as fast as possible. So obviously once we generate a lead, they start getting multiple emails. They get three emails literally in 30 minutes. Some people will be like, wow, that’s too much.

Arlen Robinson ([08:37].76)
Okay.

Philip Smith ([08:39].626)
But if someone complains to me, I’m actually happy because that means they know who we are. It’s better than them not knowing who we are. So we hit them hard with text. Now text, you can’t be too aggressive. But email, we hit them hard. Text, we hit them. We try to push as many people through many chat, through Facebook and do the automation there through the messenger because that’s just as good as SMS. A lot of people don’t really think about that. That’s just as good as SMS because you’re hitting them just like a text.

Arlen Robinson ([08:45].417)
Right.

Arlen Robinson ([08:50].162)
Right.

Philip Smith ([09:08].074)
but it’s just through Facebook, they’re gonna get their notification, they’re gonna see it. One strategy I’ll tell you real quick on SMS, because it’s very easy to get shut down with SMS marketing if you’re too aggressive, or you just get slightly, you know, such a small amount of complaints. What we do is when we text somebody with no links, no phone numbers, no nothing, it’s just we ask them a question. And when they respond to us, that’s when we send them links, or a phone number or whatever to do, right? Take that next step.

Arlen Robinson ([09:08].444)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([09:36].766)
because when you keep sending the same link over and over and over again, that’s when the carriers start to have a problem, especially if there’s no response rate. But in terms of that lead coming in, we hit them across the board. We hit them up with voicemail drops. We hit them up with some automation. Obviously AI’s changed a lot of things there, but that’s the reason why we created our own software because we hated the fact that we had to log into 10 different accounts for

Arlen Robinson ([09:37].297)
Yeah.

Philip Smith ([10:05].35)
all the ways that we contact somebody. So we actually create the software just to have it all in one spot. But the automation is obviously key and how much you contact people individually is gonna be different for each company and what you’re selling.

Arlen Robinson ([10:19].28)
Yeah, yeah, really, really true. It’s interesting that you mentioned about the SMS. And I like that strategy, like you said, because you do have to be careful if you’re talking about SMS. You know, of course you’re gonna be automating those campaigns, but yeah, if you’re too aggressive, you could get shut down. There’s a lot of regulations about that type of thing. And then…

The last thing you do is, the last thing you want is to be shut down and not be able to send out SMS’s. But yeah, that’s interesting. So you’re asking that just that one initial question that’s going to really kind of warm it up, kind of warm up the lead and figure out if that lead is worth kind of going forward with, I guess you could say. And then take it to the next step. So you’re not really, you know.

just kind of blasting them with all of your information, your links, your promotions, all of that. You kind of just ask that initial question and then wait for the response. So yeah, I like that. That seems like a really good strategy. Now, you talked about it, everybody in this current world, in the marketing world, in 2023 right now, we’ve all been kind of inundated with AI, everything AI. And so there’s a ton of AI tools out there that have just really reshaped marketing.

And I know you’re probably working with a few. I also wanted to see, can you provide some examples of any AI tools that you guys are working with that you feel would be beneficial for an e-commerce business to be able to automate their marketing efforts?

Philip Smith ([11:48].85)
I have to tell you, we tried a lot of them at this point, and so many of them actually are not there yet. So I’ll give you an example. We tried one where you make the video, and then you can edit the text and just create. So I could say, let’s just say I generate a lead, and I say, hi, John. Thank you for your interest in our services, et cetera, et cetera. But John is Beth, is Zach. I mean, so the name changes every time. It looks like I’m saying it, right?

Arlen Robinson ([11:55].558)
Okay.

Philip Smith ([12:18].482)
So we’ve tried multiple of those. Some of them are okay. The problem that they actually have with me is the beard actually screws it up. And so when they say John or they change the name, you can tell it’s all garbled. You can tell it’s not real. But I do know people that have done it that don’t have a beard. And actually it does work. The reason why that is a great tool to use is because you wanna build a relationship with your leads, right, your potential customers, clients.

Arlen Robinson ([12:27].331)
Okay. Gotcha.

Philip Smith ([12:48].85)
And that’s just a great tool to use. It doesn’t matter what company you use, try them all out. I don’t want to narrow down to any specific companies because there’s so many of them out there that are trying to do this. I have a friend that actually is doing that himself right now, who’s actually pretty far along. So I got to try his out too. But we’re so early in this stuff right now that somebody is going to become the leader, right? And all these individual services that they’re creating.

But that is a really cool tool just to be able to create that video on demand. So here’s the idea. You generate a lead. That lead goes to the software. That data goes to the software, tells it to create a new video with the first name. It creates the video, puts the name in the video, and then you automatically email it or text it whatever to the lead and say, hey, welcome. And they think now, whoever that person is, for me, obviously, I’m the face of my company. Like, oh my god, Phil just made me a video. How crazy is that?

Right? That’s the idea. That’s a really, really cool tool. The other one that we’re doing is the conversational AI. So you talk to somebody over the phone, the biggest problem with those is the lag time. You can really tell that it’s not real. So we played around with that, but the lag time is so bad. I would never use these unless I told them what I was doing. If I said, hey, these are tools that you can use.

Arlen Robinson ([13:48].68)
Right. Mm-hmm. Right.

Philip Smith ([14:13].982)
Here’s how it works. Here’s what’s happening right now. Then it makes sense. But if you try to pretend that it’s real and it’s not, then you just look dumb, right? So, but that’s a great tool. And then the online chatting, same concept. See, here’s the thing with AI that people hopefully don’t get sucked into. There’s a lot of automation that’s always existed and they just call it AI because it’s the new buzzword. Like I’ve seen people use software, take software that we’ve been using for four years.

And they now call it AI. It’s like, dude, it’s just automation. But it’s good from a marketing standpoint. All these people selling courses and all this type of stuff. It’s kind of mind numbing after a while. It’s like somebody posted on Facebook, somebody in Norway said, all right, guys, the big rush is over. Now you’re going to have to actually figure out how to make money with AI. So it’s an interesting world in the guru market.

Arlen Robinson ([14:47].042)
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson ([15:05].27)
Exactly.

Philip Smith ([15:09].934)
right now in the in a rush to sell courses and stuff. But but those are the three cool ones. Listen, there’s a lot of stuff where if you’d like for podcasts, I don’t do podcasts, but you can take your whole podcast and strip out everything instantly and make the shorter videos. But even the one where you take an hour long video like this video right here, you can take it and use software that will cut out all the good parts. But it’s not perfect. I rather just pay my guys to do it because they’re going to do it right. And it’s going to be good. So I rather pay the extra money.

Arlen Robinson ([15:14].002)
Yeah. Yeah.

Philip Smith ([15:39].186)
because it’s going to be better quality as of today. Right. That’s what I’m saying. Everything’s so new that no one’s really figured it out. And it’s like, oh, my God, this is amazing. Everybody’s having issues, but everybody’s rushing the market and trying to grab that market share right to grow. So that’s where we’re at. But there’s definitely some cool stuff that you can use today, like with the videos, the conversational stuff that is the stuff that we really like.

Arlen Robinson ([15:51].87)
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson ([16:03].928)
Yeah, those are cool things. I’m familiar with all those types of solutions. And you’re right, it is really early in the game with them. They’re not perfect. But since we are early, if we’re looking five years out, 10 years out, I think at that point, then there’s going to be some clear leaders in all of this. And a lot of these guys that are just rushed in there just trying to throw their hat in it, they’re probably going to be flushed out. And then

we’re really gonna start to see some cool stuff, I think, in like at least five years or so, but it is pretty early. And I agree with the fact that the ones that kind of, where it acts as almost a salesperson and it’s doing your outbound calls, yeah, those things are, they’re pretty rough. I get a ton of spam calls and one time I picked it up and I’m like, all right, for a second, it kind of catches you. It does seem like it really is that person, but then.

Philip Smith ([16:50].123)
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson ([16:58].78)
You know, it’s that lag which is really killing it. You know, you say something and then you’re like, you’re waiting, you’re waiting, like, okay, this is just spam. This is just automated AI bot. And then you see it. So it’s early, yeah. If you’re gonna use something like that, you definitely tell the customers, you know, okay, you know, we’re trying out some stuff. Let them know what it is. Cause otherwise, you know, you just, you’re gonna end up looking kind of corny and it’s just not gonna be effective for what you’re trying to achieve.

Philip Smith ([17:07].676)
No. Yeah, exactly.

Arlen Robinson ([17:28].644)
And so, yeah, so yeah, good stuff. But yeah, I just can’t wait to kind of see where all of this is gonna be going. Now, a lot of businesses are doing things, and I’m sure you can kind of testify to this fact, running multiple businesses where you’re kind of the sole person. There’s a lot of things, of course, I know that you were probably doing prior, doing yourself manually prior to automating things.

what would a business need to kind of consider before transitioning into doing some automated marketing?

Philip Smith ([18:07].526)
Yeah, I guess I’ll say this. When it comes to running any business that wants to make money online, you really need to understand your entire funnel. I work with a lot of companies over the years that concentrate on driving traffic, but their website’s not converting. Or they’re so good at selling, but they can’t drive the traffic, right? The entire thing has to work together. The last thing that anybody wants to do is go waste money or try something and it’s

Arlen Robinson ([18:15].922)
Yep.

Philip Smith ([18:35].27)
it doesn’t work for them, but it’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s just that they didn’t set it up correctly. You know what I mean? So for example, if someone wants to go out there and say, I’m going to automate driving traffic to my site, and I’m going to automate the contact methods of SMS, email, whatever, you have to make sure that your conversion rates are correct. You have to make sure you drive. I’ve seen people, companies drive traffic to a homepage. Worse thing, a possibly do.

You have to drive into a page that’s actually going to generate that lead, give some sort of offer or whatever it is, and don’t let them go anywhere else. Generate that lead and then take the next steps. And then you have your longer drip campaigns or whatever you’re going to do on the sales process. We have a lot of videos. We sell a lot of services. And I know a lot of companies that sell services and they let people go straight to a phone call. I know someone that generates similar amount of revenue than we do. They have 25 salespeople.

We have four because we force people to go through a video that filter themselves out and it does all that automation for you. So what one of the biggest things that I changed over the years and one of the first things ever changed was the concept of generating a lead and getting on a phone with them and having to sell to now automate it and let a video do the work. Because a video can do it 24 7 3 65 where a salesperson can work normal business hours, maybe on the weekend. Right. So what do you do? The other.

Arlen Robinson ([19:33].492)
Okay.

Philip Smith ([20:03].094)
12 hours or whatever, 16 hours a day, right? So that was the first thing I ever did. A lot of companies feel they’re gonna lose leads and lose all the stuff if they don’t let them schedule a call, whatever. But for me, it’s crazy. Let the video, let the sales process do its job online and then let that lead filter themselves out and push them because it’s doing all the work for you. And then you know what you can do? You could push more volume through that funnel.

Arlen Robinson ([20:26].987)
Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([20:31].066)
Salespeople get maxed out very easily, right? If I just let people schedule a call, and I’ve tried this, I tested it out, I can fill a whole week calendar like that with one email. Right, but why? Half the people aren’t gonna show up because they don’t really know what’s going on. It’s like, yeah, I scheduled a call on Thursday, four days from now, they’re not showing up. You know, I should say 50% of them are not showing up. So now you just wasted all that time, effort, you’re on the phone.

Arlen Robinson ([20:54].036)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Philip Smith ([20:59].994)
Spin in your wheels. Let the automation, let the video, let everything do its job. And let them tell you that they have the money to invest in the products or services that you’re selling. And that is a huge game changer just from a sales process. And then, obviously, adding in all the other little things that we talked about already with the contacting them and SMS, email, et cetera. So.

Arlen Robinson ([21:25].252)
Yeah. So you think we’re at a point now where, because you bring up a very good argument where there’s a lot of businesses that say, yeah, with their outreach, they got to get the person on a call. They got to get them in a demo call, demo meeting, whatever it is, or else they feel it’s not really a solid lead. They need somebody face to face with them on their sales team talking to them. But what you’re saying is we’re kind of in the day and age where…

that’s not necessary. People are comfortable with just consuming information about a company via just a video, getting their objections. I answer just through video and information you’re distributing. Is it, are we kind of at that stage where you think most people are comfortable with doing that? Or is it only certain?

demographics of people that will do that.

Philip Smith ([22:21].638)

Well, I’ll tell you, it’s actually where the traffic comes from. And it depends on also the type of services you’re selling, right? So there’s a lot of factors in there. To me, I do it. I don’t care. I just do it, right? So it doesn’t matter to me. And I won’t advertise it on platforms that doesn’t work. So for example, TikTok, as an example, I would run Facebook ads and it’d be like $8 a lead, TikTok less than a dollar. I’m like, how do we not make money? It’s less than a dollar. We can have the worst conversion.

Arlen Robinson ([22:33].133)
Okay, we got to it.

Philip Smith ([22:51].378)
ever and still make money. It’s less than a dollar for a thousand dollar product. I need to bring in one person out of a thousand leads, right? Where Facebook, we’re at 3%. We got three out of a hundred. But guess what? TikTok took, I think, three to four months to finally work. Just to be profitable. That’s how bad it was. You can’t get the people on TikTok and their mindset and how they consume content.

Arlen Robinson ([22:56].049)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. care.

Philip Smith ([23:19].858)
and then to go ask them to watch like a 30 minute or 45 minute video, doesn’t work. YouTube, Google’s fine. LinkedIn is a little different because you’re now dealing with more business people. Again, it depends on what you’re selling, but LinkedIn’s a little different. Facebook, so you have like, LinkedIn’s a great platform for businesses and B2B, but when it comes to the other stuff, YouTube’s really good, Google’s better.

Arlen Robinson ([23:24].724)
Yeah, got it. Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([23:49].162)
Facebook’s worse, TikTok’s horrendous. Facebook and Instagram are pretty much the same. So it depends on where the traffic’s coming from, it depends on what you’re selling and what you’re promoting, what you’re trying to do. But yeah, at the end of the day, what I learned is that if someone’s truly interested in your services, they will watch the video. I’m not saying the video has to be an hour long, it could be three minutes. They may be totally fine. You just wanna, all you wanna do is filter them out and make sure they actually want the service and have the money to afford it.

Arlen Robinson ([23:58].025)
I see. Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([24:17].874)
That’s all you’re trying to do. So however long it takes you to get that done, it’s fine. We have services where we get someone to interview on TV. That video is like eight minutes long. No big deal. But I have another video for a different service that’s an hour, because I need to get them through that hour-long video to make sure to truly series. So it’s all over the place, depending on the type of service and providing and what information I want to put in front of them before we speak to them.

Right? And we’re really strict about that. People contact us like you got to watch the video. If you’re serious about the service, if you can’t invest the 10 minutes or whatever time into it, then the services aren’t that important to you. Right? So that’s just the way I look at it. And we probably lose people. But I can generate 10x the amount of leads through my funnel than someone that’s just scheduling six calls a day for the sales guy. Because that’s all they can take. How many calls can one sales guy take?

Arlen Robinson ([24:44].125)
Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Philip Smith ([25:11].306)
So I’d rather take a filter lead versus a non-filter lead and let them talk to someone.

Arlen Robinson ([25:16].736)
Yeah, that makes sense. And I agree, there’s no catch all with this. It depends on what the source of the lead is. Depends on the product. Certain price points, people are going to be more comfortable with doing that. And they don’t necessarily need to talk to somebody to make a decision. A quick video may be all that you need to get them to that next level. So yeah, I totally get it.

Philip Smith ([25:43].168)
Mm-hmm.

Arlen Robinson ([25:46].432)
Do you think you can be able to share either company you work with or just that you’re knowledgeable with in general, you can share a quick success story where you’ve seen marketing automation truly lead to substantial scaling of business and substantial growth.

Philip Smith ([26:04].85)
Yeah, so I mean, there’s a bunch of them. But so I’ll throw one out there. There’s a guy, Carlos Corona. He actually came through our education business back in 2019. Beginning of 19, my first met him. I was actually speaking at an event in Miami and he lived there. Brought a box of cigars down. We hung out at the hotel. And I explained the lead generation business with them, which is a completely automated and scalable business.

And fast forward to 2021, when he started figuring it out and got into the business, and he started hitting seven figures in one month in revenue, just generating leads and selling them. So the lead generation business basically generating leads and selling them off to a lead buyer. So he did that in the Medicare space during open enrollment, which is around this time, but two years ago. And he actually hit his first seven figure month. It’s crazy.

That’s an individual that obviously built a business. Now he has a bunch of employees and doing a lot more than just that. So we’ve helped multiple people get into that industry. In terms of a company, you could take a company called Global Business Lending. I’m actually now doing more business with them. You can’t see it, but this guy over here, Zach, he came to my very first event I ever did in March of 19. And he took the strategy, this is the best advice I can give to a business.

All right, the best advice I can give to a business is right here. A lot of companies don’t even think about this. A lot of companies probably will never even do this. But if they do it, it can be a massive game changer. I had multiple people over the years tell me that they implemented this strategy and they’ve added six figures a month, seven figures a year to their business. And Zach did this right away and doubled his revenue within six months.

Arlen Robinson ([27:54].612)
Yeah.

Philip Smith ([28:00].762)
of doing this one strategy. So in any business, I don’t care who you are or what you do, you have either leads, you have customer data, whatever that is. The idea is to monetize your leads or your data via other services. It’s obviously not a competing service. It’s something that’s synergistic, right? So for example, I used to do a lot in a business loan space. So I would generate leads that are looking for a business loan.

Not everybody can get approved, of course. They may be a startup, right? So they can’t really get approved for an actual business loan because you need to be in business generating revenue to get a loan, to get approved. So what we would do is we would ask them, what’s your credit score? If they had bad credit, I’d sell off that lead to a credit repair company. If they wanted to build their business credit, I sell that lead to a business credit services company.

Arlen Robinson ([28:39].122)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([28:57].338)
we actually started promoting self-employed mortgages, right? Mortgages for business owners where you can get approved without a W-2, without tax returns. It’s, I don’t know if you know anything about that. I learned about that a few years ago. Very interesting world. Um, we had companies that just provided services to prep a company to get approved for a business loan. Then we started providing marketing services, right? So you take one lead. I could put five, six, seven different services in front of them. And.

Arlen Robinson ([28:57].722)
Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([29:26].366)
Hopefully they take advantage of one of them, but my revenue skyrocketed because just because they’re not interested in me or maybe I can’t help them. Maybe even if I do help them, I can still help them do something else. So there’s a company that started doing this out of Austin, Texas, Sky Brad. I actually ran into him earlier this year at the, I’m part of Rise Nation, which is Damon John’s mastermind group. It was our first event in San Diego in March. And I’m at the bar, Brad comes up, known him for years, obviously.

goes, man, do you remember when you spoke at War Room and you talked about monetizing data? I’m like, Yeah, yeah, that was a couple years ago. And he goes, it’s always stuck in my head. And I finally started doing it last year. And I literally added six figures a month in revenue to my business. I’m like, seriously, I’m like, so you’re buying drinks, right? I just want to make sure. So he, he basically told me he does merchant processing. That’s his business. He does merchant processing. So he generates all these business leads.

Arlen Robinson ([30:07].601)
Mm-hmm. Hehehehe Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([30:23].57)
And what he did was he built out a whole drip campaign, six months, and just started promoting all these other services to them, all different stuff. And basically those leads obviously were interested, some of them are always going to be interested in something. And they started signing up, they got paid or whatever it was. And then he said, you know, now that I see this working, it makes sense for me to figure out which services are the best ones or the most, you know, the ones that are converting the best and paying the most.

I’m thinking about just building that out myself. And now I’ll make more money because obviously it’s my own internal service. At the end of the day, that’s what Amazon does. That’s what Google does. That’s what all these big companies are doing. They’re creating services based on their customer base. I mean, Amazon basically works with everybody. So they got into medical world recently and just brought in 30 million people into their medical services that they’re doing overnight. Just like that.

Arlen Robinson ([30:53].84)
Mm-hmm Yeah Right. Yeah.

Philip Smith ([31:23].314)
We, it’s the same concept. All the big companies are already doing it. And now, you know, as the small companies can obviously take the same strategy. So that’s like the absolute best advice I can give somebody.

Arlen Robinson ([31:27].24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Arlen Robinson ([31:35].492)
Yeah, I like that. It’s kind of like you’re getting these leads and you’re kind of taking their pulse. And even though you’re you may not be able to, you know, resolve their issue, service them with the services or products that you provide, you know, they have some other needs. And then why not just capitalize on that either through partnerships that you may have with some other companies, like you mentioned, the credit repair, in your case, with the lending, or some other service.

where maybe you don’t offer it, but you’re getting a referral fee from it, or it’s another maybe not your main service, but kind of a subset of your services that, you know, you say, okay, we’re getting a lot of leads that fall in this category, we can service them that way. So I get it, yeah, that really makes sense. It’s almost like, you know, not letting any lead go to waste pretty much, you know, you’re really trying to.

to get as much from them as you can, even though they may not be your quote unquote ideal customer, they’ve kind of, you’ve got their attention, so you might as well see how you can help them. And yeah, I totally get that. Now, as we get ready to wrap things up, so wanted to see, things are.

changing on such a rapid pace. You know, we’ve talked already a lot about AI and all of these changing technologies. I wanted to see how do you envision this evolution of, you know.

Excuse me, how do you really envision just the kind of the evolution of product page developments with technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality now becoming really prevalent in this whole e-commerce world? Because that’s kind of, I think, the next big thing.

Philip Smith ([33:41].698)
Yeah, I have to say, you know, anything that you can do where people are more immersed in what you’re selling and they feel more like part of it, like, you know, like the whole the glasses thing, right? It came out years ago, where you go to site and you put your face on there and you can look see what you look like what now you can walk through stores, you know, virtually and whatever. Whenever, of course, when it first comes out, it’s really cool. It’s like, oh, my god, you know, this is great. It’s gonna get people excited. And they’re gonna want to obviously buy more stuff. And it is

Arlen Robinson ([33:55].281)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Philip Smith ([34:11].23)
then of course it’s going to be normal for most companies as time goes on. It’s just going to keep going and going and going. If we get into this whole, obviously with AI and the metaverse and whatever, whoever is going to create this stuff where we almost live in an alternate reality, that’s where we’re going. It’s kind of scary. What was that movie? Total Recall, I think, or whatever movie Arnold Schwarzenegger did where you’re living in a different world. You know? I f—–

Arlen Robinson ([34:31].74)
Yeah.

Philip Smith ([34:39].794)
Maybe that’s not the right movie. But basically, that’s where we’re going, where we can sit on our couch and live another life somehow. You know, and have a robot get us everything. You know what I mean? It’s kind of weird to think about it. Obviously, that’s the path we’re going. There was a commercial with the robots at like a baseball game. We were promoting a movie, but they had literally robots in the stands, you know? So of course, the first time you see it, it’s like, oh, wow, but.

That’s where we’re going. Think about the Jetsons, I guess. But yeah, I mean, it’s coming. It’s going to be the normal eventually. And I think people, there’s a lot of people in this country that really aren’t that happy with their lives, right? I mean, that’s just the way it is. So the more that they can go live another life, kind of like for a couple of hours or whatever, and have like,

Arlen Robinson ([35:28].573)
Yeah, sure.

Philip Smith ([35:36].966)
People always think the grass is greener, right? But it’s really not. You know, but people just want, people always want what they can’t have. So if they can go become a celebrity for a day and somehow live that alternate life and you can give them that and pay for that service or buy products based on that, you know what I mean? Like I 100% see all sorts of stuff coming for the average person who just is not, you know, can never live the life that they think that they want. Right, so.

Arlen Robinson ([35:40].305)
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson ([36:03].596)
Yeah, very true. Excuse me, and the brands are, the brands see this and all of these technology companies that are kind of pushing this augmented reality, virtual reality. They know this, they know that, you know, the masses of the large mass of people that are, you know, just unhappy and miserable and will never kind of get to the levels that they want to be in. So it’s kind of like that movie, you know, the Ready Player One, if you see it where, you know, the masses of people were, you know, like the kid in the movie.

Philip Smith ([36:28].126)
Bye.

Arlen Robinson ([36:32].228)
was almost living in a slum, basically, stacked on top of people in these little kind of cargo containers. But yet he was able to immerse himself into this virtual world. And that’s where, that’s all he wanted to do because he became another person. So yeah, they’re pushing for it. And that’s kind of where things are going. And I think, just as a brand, you have to kind of foresee things going that way and then figure out how you’re gonna be.

how you’re gonna position yourself into this world, because it is coming, whether you like it or not. And so I think the main thing to keep in mind is, you know, you wanna be prepared and figure out, you know, how you will be able to service your company when these changes, service your customers when these changes do come. So it’s gonna be interesting, I know that for sure.

Well, Phil, this has been an awesome conversation. I can talk about these things all day for sure, because we’re at an exciting time. But I think this has been an awesome conversation. I know our listeners and viewers have learned a lot from it. But lastly, before we close things out, I would like to switch gears just so our listeners and viewers can get to know you a little bit better. If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think you’d be interested to know.

Philip Smith ([37:54].742)
I’ll give you two quick ones. One thing I have, my biggest, one thing that gets my adrenaline rushing every day is speed. I’ve been a quote unquote street racer since I was like 15 years old. I was just in Miami last week and every time we go to Miami, we rent like Ferraris and exotic cars, but this time we rented a Rolls Royce Ghost, which is the big four door. And we had that thing up to 140 miles an hour.

Arlen Robinson ([37:56].699)
Okay. Okay. Yep.

Philip Smith ([38:23].562)
smoked a Mustang. The thing’s pretty fast for the size of it. I just have this need for speed. I don’t know why. I just love it. My friends always say, you’re going to kill me in a car accident one day. Fastest I ever got is 168 miles per hour in a Lamborghini convertible top down on I-95 in Fort Louratel. But that’s one thing about me. I should have become a race car driver. That’s what I should be. But that’s one thing.

Arlen Robinson ([38:24].896)
Wow. Wow. That’s right.

Philip Smith ([38:53].422)
And more personal, I guess I would say, you know, life is all about experiences. We can all buy things. We can always want the next best thing and whatnot. But at the end of the day, the one thing you’ll always have on your death bed is, you know, just the memories and experiences. That’s been very important for me, for my kids. I travel a lot. They travel a lot, obviously. And that’s one of the most important things I think that anybody should do is just see the world while you’re here and just experience life.

because that’s all we can do. All the other stuff is crap, to be honest with you, at the end of the day. But yeah, that’s just me personally. As you get older, or at least as I get older, obviously those things change. So now that I’m older with kids, those things matter more. So.

Arlen Robinson ([39:41].264)
Yeah, I truly agree. You know, it’s all about those experiences, all of these material items. I mean, you can have the nicest place in the world, the nicest cars, but you know, after a while, you know, it just fades. The thrill always fades, no matter what it is that you get. And then the experiences, like you said, are really always the ones that are lasting, because you can think back about how you were, how you felt, the things that you did, and those things are what kinda can keep you going. So…

Yeah, good stuff, good stuff. And it sounds like you may have been in the wrong career as far as your need for speed. But it’s good to know that these days, those fast exotic cars are within arm’s reach. You can always, I know there’s a ton of these exotic car rentals and things that you can do. And I know you can, I’m sure you’ve done the thing where you can take those on tracks. I’m in the Orlando area and I think they have one of those experiences here where you can.

you can rent one of those exotic cars and take it around the track, get it up to like, you know, close to 200. So I’m sure that’ll be able to kind of fulfill your need for speed.

Philip Smith ([40:43].283)
Yep. Hehehe

Arlen Robinson ([40:48].164)
Yeah, well, it’s been great talking to you, Phil. Lastly, before we do let you go, why don’t you let our listeners and viewers know the best way for them to reach you if they wanna pick your brain anymore about marketing automation or anything marketing under the sun.

Philip Smith ([41:04].082)
Yeah, my main website is just my name, philipfsmith.com. It’s right up there above me. Just go to philipfsmith.com and fill out a form and go from there. But that’s probably the easiest way.

Arlen Robinson ([41:17].376)
Okay. Okay, awesome. Thanks for sharing that. We’ll have that link in the show notes. And yes, been awesome talking to you, Philip. We appreciate having you on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Philip Smith ([41:28].972)
Appreciate it.

Podcast Guest Info

Philip F. Smith
Founder of All In One Marketing.com